Why do newborns smile when they sleep?
A newborn's smile during sleep can be a brief, spontaneous expression rather than a response to a person or a remembered event. This introduction looks at early reflexive smiles and the gradual development of social smiling without assuming we can know what a sleeping baby experiences.
Babies smile even before they are born
If you were lucky enough to see your baby smiling on an ultrasound, don’t think you were imagining things that weren’t happening. A study that looked at more than 500 pregnant women using 4D ultrasound, found that up to 31 fetuses were actually smiling. All of them smiled for an average time of 3.21 seconds each. In this way, scientists determined that spontaneous smiles occur even when babies are still in the womb, and way prior to their birth.
Now, thanks to the development of new technologies that allow us to peek at babies inside their mother’s womb to see what’s going on in there before birth, it became possible to discover that fetuses can also yawn as early as 18 weeks after they were conceived. Around week 26 of their gestation, they can smile, blink, and even cry from inside the womb — these facial expressions are involuntary reflexes they’re developing as a sort of preparation for the moment of birth.
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